The First Q and A

Khamko Baccam, 1990

Once the car carrying him and his friends stopped rolling, it was upside down in the middle of the road, not hidden in the bottom of a ditch or out in a stubbled cornfield where it might have been missed by carloads of his friends returning to campus, as he had been, from a hockey game.

When other cars came upon the accident scene, some of his friends, frantic with the realization that their buddy was still inside, tried madly to right that car and get him out, but it didn't work. There were no miracles.

By the time the rescue squad arrived, dozens of kids saw them remove his body.

His name was Khamko, an Asian-American student, a soccer star, a good, good kid. He died that night in an accident made even more horrible by the fact that it was all so very public.

An hour later, more than fifty of his friends stood in the waiting room the local hospital, praying and hoping they wouldn't hear the words every last one of them feared they would, the words they eventually heard anyway in the darkness of a November night.

He was a local kid, born in Laos but reared here so his funeral, bilingual, was held in a local church and attended by hundreds of students.

Had he been from somewhere far away, maybe the ordeal would have been out of sight and out of mind earlier. But the funeral was here, and his body and the casket were lowered into the ground of the local cemetery, whitened that morning by an early winter snow,

Event after event after event happened right here--his public death, the hospital waiting room, the blanket of sadness that spread like a plague over the campus on Saturday morning, the flow of grief in a totally unscheduled gathering in the chapel, Sunday worship together, Monday's funeral, Tuesday's final memorial chapel on campus—all of it happened right here, as if nothing else was happening anywhere else in the world.

For several days the whole campus walked slowly, face to the ground, hand in hand, many wiping their faces. On the wide prairie landscape where I live, there was no hiding from Khamko's death.

On Saturday night, two hundred kids held each other and cried while sitting up on the stage of the auditorium in an impromptu gathering of the wounded. Some of them read Bible passages they’d picked out. Some prayed. All of them sat together, more public tears than I’d ever seen.

They sang “When Peace Like a River” in a way that at any other time you would have considered to be very much less than full effort. One of them played piano, and really, no one sang—not if singing means raising voices. As music, it was totally unspectacular. But I’ll never forget their song because it was the most moving rendition of that old hymn I’d ever heard. “It is well, it is well with my soul. . . .” It was sung with inner voices that never really reached throats parched from a night and a day of grief none of them will ever forget.

Again on Tuesday, at Khamko’s memorial chapel, grief brooded over everything. Some professors talked about Khamko. A history prof every knew spoke a few words, then took off his glasses up in front of the biggest chapel crowd I’d ever seen, stepped back from the mike, and wiped his eyes. Another told the crowd how he’d written in his grade book that Khamko had withdrawn from class and transferred to heaven.

At the end of that memorial chapel, one of Khamko’s roommates stood behind the podium and told us how his roommates had gone out for supper together after the funeral on Monday, and how one of them had just mentioned that reading the first Q and A of the Heidelberg Catechism would be comforting, and how they did, and it was.

So, he said, they thought it would be good to do the same thing at that chapel service with all of their friends, with all who knew Khamko—how it would be fitting if the whole bunch of us, a chapel full of students and faculty and staff, would stand and repeat the answer. “You can find it in the hymnal,” he said, pointing at his, “page 861.”

And we did. Everyone turned to that page, Khamko’s roommate read the question, and, just as he said, we all responded with the answer about comfort. “I am not my own. . .I belong to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. . .”

That recitation ended the memorial chapel—but not the grief and sadness. We left quietly and walked out into soft snow that fell over the campus and the cemetery not far away, where many of the students had stood beside an open grave just an afternoon before.

I don’t know about the rest of them in the chapel that day, but I will never forget that recitation of the first Q and A of the catechism.

That whole story came back to me last night, decades later, when, at a choral concert, two choirs dedicated pieces they sang to the family and friends of a freshman student, a young woman who was killed in a crash just north of town, a day before second semester began.

“Come, Ye Disconsolate” a woman’s chorus sang, a hymn created any of a number of psalms where David opens a vain and bleeds his deep sadness before the Lord. It was sung, the director said, in memory of the young woman who had been a member of that choir.

*

Most of the what you just read is more than 20 years old, a kind of coda to a devotional book I wrote back then for high-schoolers.

But those dedications last night, same auditorium so many years later, brought back dark, but greatly blessed memories that were and still are
borne along on grief—and hope.